Depending on the audience and focus of your site, you may want to temporarily change the look of your site for a season or holiday such as Halloween or Valentine's Day. This is easily accomplished by leveraging the power of the TEMPLATE_DIRS configuration setting.

You will recall from an earlier chapter that the TEMPLATE_DIRS variable in the settings.py file allows you to specify the location of the templates for your site. One thing about which we didn't go into detail was that TEMPLATE_DIRS allows you to specify multiple locations for your template files.

When you specify multiple paths for your template files, Django will look for a requested template file in the first path, and if it doesn't find it, it will keep searching through the remaining paths until the file is located.

We can use this to our advantage by adding an override directory as the first element of the TEMPLATE_DIRS value. When we want to override a template with a special themed one, we'll add the...